N Chandrasekaran's unique style of communicating with his team

Long before he became Tata’s top man, N Chandrasekaran developed different channels of communication with different people.Masoom Gupte | ET Bureau | May 16, 2017, 08:47 IST

If one had to guess the number of emails that N Chandrasekaran gets in a day, what would it be? Perhaps the number has gone up, since he took over the Tata Sons reins. But as the TCS CEO, that number was just 40.

At the launch of Aparna Piramal Raje’s book on workstyles of senior corporate leaders in 2016, Chandra had shared the secret behind receiving few “emails of any substance”. He’d said at the time, “Half of those are spam. Someone trying to sell you something. The number of emails that I need to respond to is just 10.”

There was a time when he did get “hundreds of emails”. But that changed after TCS underwent restructuring and the decision making was passed on to the next level. Any matters that needed discussion would be handled in face-to-face meetings. Chandra doesn’t look at email as a means to keep in touch with his colleagues. He believes in using different channels of communication with different people. “I work with different people who have different styles. Some people want to talk to you everyday.

Especially if they are building something new.

Some people don’t want to be bothered. They’ll may be reach out once in 10 days,” he said. Some people prefer texting, some don’t. For him, everything is okay.

“We work as a network and not in a hierarchical fashion. I don’t like any Chandra-style of working. I like to work in a way that everyone is comfortable with,” he said.

Even with customers, there were various ways in which he kept in touch: travelling extensively, meeting executives from at least 500 companies, connecting over video conferences or exchanging texts with key customers occasionally.